The lab

The lab works alongside companies on the machines that matter most to them: robot cells, aircraft, radio links and systems that have to do something nothing off the shelf can. Together we take each one from a hard brief to a machine that is built, tested and working.

Alongside this the lab works on open problems our team cares about directly: defending cities against small drones, dexterous hands, and the design engine itself. Its papers are published here.

One small team does the whole job: the mechanism, the electronics, the enclosure, the control and the build, with nothing lost between handoffs.

The lab's design engine, built in its research, puts AI into every stage of the process: framing the problem, searching for designs and checking each result before the next stage uses it. That is how a small lab moves as fast as one many times larger.

In 2021 Ismail led a startup that designed a drone with AI, working with Autodesk; it was shown in the opening of NVIDIA GTC 2021. The same team built an AI driver whose result came shortly before Sony AI published the same class of result on the cover of Nature.

Since mid 2026 the lab has designed and built for clients in industrial robotics, offshore aviation and entertainment.